Archive for August, 2009

Wyse released this week their PocketCloud iPhone app. You might wonder how can I run a large desktop on just a small iPhone screen, with no styles but just your big finger, well Wyse really did solve this challange with their application. During VMworld the app is on sale for $19.99 on the iTunes App store, after september 6th it will go back to $29.99.

Chad from EMC is already present in San Francisco at the buildup of VMworld 2009 and has posted some interesting pictures. This year there will be 3 ‘datacenters’ at the event where VMware is placing all its kit to support all the hands-on labs, email stations, booths, etc. The biggest datacenter is showing 16 Racks with each 4 Cisco UCS blade chasis, with each 8 blades = 512 Blades! WOW!!

Everyone (hopefully) wants to be green now-a-days and virtualization is helping with that goal by consolidating a lot of your servers. I have asked many IT administrators in the last year ‘do you know how much power your datacenter uses?‘ and pretty much never did I hear a ‘yes‘ as answer.

So why is that? Most IT managers never see the energy bill as facilities take care of that. But would you not as IT manager want to have this information to help proof that moving to virtualization was a good move.

I personally run a reasonable size datacenter at VMware, our demo briefing center, and want to know myself how much power we are using. So I did some investigation in this, but found out this is a very expensive wish. I was only able to find solutions based on physical hardware that can monitor your power consumption, costing around $1000 per PDU strip. Just for my small datacenter alone that would cost me $20.000+ just to figure out how much power I use.

But hold on! most hardware today, especially servers, have build in power monitors. All my HP servers and Blades and all my Dell servers and Blades can report individually how much power they are using. So why is there no software out there that consolidates all this??? I have searched, but came up empty. How hard can it be to have an application that reads out the power consumption every X minutes from all your supported devices and historically stores this and provides some nice graphs??

So here my idea, let me know if you care about this as well. If enough people think so, I will write the bloody app myself and make it available for free. If you already know of an app that does this, please let us know in the comments. I thought there was an iPhone App for everything?